Bonded by Infection
by Hella12345
Summary: Update on Summary: no idea where I am going with this. It is a story about the relationship between Altair and Malik (romantic...i don't know) and how they deal with the impasse Alex, who was sent to Third Crusade, has infected on them(still don't know whether to change it to a crossover with prototype because it might hardly involve Alex). still rated M for violence


_**A.N: I know that crossovers are supposed to be categorized as such, problem with that and this story, it's an Altair and Malik fanfiction more than anything…I posted this (still need to be edited) first chapter so you guys could tell me what I should do with this fanfiction:**_

_**Keep it where it is or change it to a cross over?**_

_**Responses will be much appreciated.**_

_**Note: I'm not a professorial writer (a novice at best) and I'm willing to receive critique for improvement.  
**_

**_A.N: ___****Heavily** Edited (03/22/2013) (but always room for more improvement)

* * *

**~1191 Solomon's Temple, Jerusalem~**

Water dripped from the overhead stalactites of the shadowy tunnel and landed on their partnered stalagmite. One of the softened sounds of a stabbed droplet was matched with that of a hidden blade, pricing itself into the cervical vertebrae of an elderly man, whose curiously repaid him the unfortunate fate with an assassin's fang. That assassin being Altair Ibn-La'Ahad.

"An excellent kill!" the child in a journeyman's frame applauded, "Fortune favours your blade."

Altair restrained his bloating pride from blighting his elegant composure, but he did permit a smile.

"Not fortune. Skill." He turned from the limp prey at his feet to a toothy grinning Kadar and his older brother Malik, following closely behind, who scowled as darkly as the shadows that concealed him. Altair ignored the disapproving gesture, "Watch a while longer and you might learn something." That could have been directed to any of the two brothers.

"Indeed," Malik inserted a venomous retort, "He'll teach you how to disregard everything the Master's taught us."

Altair's eyes flashed antagonism. "And how would have you done it?" he snapped, challenging Malik as he did his conduct. The conduct of a Master Assassin.

"I would not have drawn attention to us." He boldly marched up to Altair to meet him at eye level, "I would not have taken the life of an _innocent_. What _I_ would have done is follow the Creed."

"_Nothing is true. Everything is permitted_." He stated the phrase in manner of a validation, "Understand these words. It matters not how we complete our task, only that it's done."

"But this is not the way of-"

"My way is better." Altair snaps coldly, not wanting to hear another riposte from Malik's lips.

Thankfully Malik withdrew, for now. "I will scout ahead." He proceeded to travel further, but paused to look over his shoulder at Altair, "Try not to dishonour us further." His warning came with an icy draft.

Altair continued to glare long after the thick darkness swallowed up the back of the assassin.

"What is our mission?" Kadar's voice pulled him out of his trance. "My brother would say nothing to me. Only that I should be honoured to have been invited."

It was understandable. An assassin of lower rank would be provided with ambiguous or menial information about a mission.

Altair figured exposure to _some_ details would not cause any harm to their objective.

"The Master believes that the Templars have found something beneath the Temple mount."

Kadar's eyes widened with awe and anticipation, as Altair predicted they would. "Treasure?" he woofed with the enthusiasms of a young boy.

As much as Altair enjoyed the reverence he received from Kadar, he refused to give honoured privileges to those who did not deserve them.

"I do not know." He crossed his arms, inferring to not ask any further questions, "All that matters is that the Master considers it important, else he would not have asked _me_ to retrieve it."

Kadar nodded, grasping his insinuate, and followed suit to Altair's descension into the Temple.

**~2008 Gentek Headquarters: Manhattan~**

The heavy skies over Manhattan dumped gallons of rain onto its streets, nearly overflowing its sewer system.

Alex would have _loved _to have picked any other day, other than this one, to infiltrated one of Gentek's headquarters. But, as his damn luck had it, there was no time to postpone this to a later date. Dana managed to weasel out some useful intel on a device Gentek obtained from a corporation, called Abstergo Industries. Apparently, Gentek was the company's subsidiary.

Whatever the device may be it was powerful. Dana said it was a virtual hell to crack through the security system, only to gain its current location. She couldn't manage to dig up any details, only that she highly anticipated that it would be relocated to someplace with a more advance lockup systems.

"They're going to transport it out of Manhattan, likely cuz they don't want you to get your hands on it. If you wanna know what I think: I think you should move your fucken ass and get it before we'll be wishing it sayonara."

Alex took the hint and ignored the fact that the surface of his biomass seethed rebelliously to the precipitation beating down on it.

He bit his lip in frustration and leapt off the ledge of a skyscraper overshadowing the headquarters.

_This better be fucken worth it!_

He landed on the roof with a resonated thud, cracking the concreted beneath his feet. So much for the undetected approach, but Alex was too agitated to give a damn. He looked around and spotted what he was searching for. An air vent.

He came up to it and liquesce into a black slugged, coiled himself through the thin opening and into the metallic reticulation.

"Fuck! You'd think these retards dusted the place. _Fuck_!" Alex hissed as he slithered through the air vents, too small for crawling space. Dusts, spider webs, insects' carcases and other things he didn't want to identify stuck to him.

"Better be worth it! Better be _worth _it! _Dana, _this better be _fucken_ worth it! _Shit_!" The mantra growled on his lips. He finally sludged himself to an opening that held promise on the other side.

Peering through the narrow grilled slits, he saw two lab technicians dressed in the typical long white coat attire. They were discussing among themselves about the perplexing _artefact,_ sent from Abstergo, to analyse its effects on organic matter.

Be it an _artefact_ or _device_ it all sounded like the same shit in Alex's ears.

"I heard that we will have to be transferred to conduct further research." Said the man with seaweed black hair and thick-framed glasses.

"If it means getting out of this hell-pit, I'll work on it till the day I die." The other man, more heavy in frame and a forehead cracked with wrinkles, sighed in relief at the news.

"Perhaps this artefact might be the key in defeating Zeus and containing the Blacklight virus, if what the scientists at Abstergo said is true."

Alex did not like the sound of that.

"Then we better get down to the lab and see that it happens. And hope to god that their theories are correct."

Alex eyed them patiently from his hidey-hole, like a predator contemplating its moment to strike.

As if intended, the large man dropped his pen from his clipboard. It rolled away from him and stop perfectly underneath Alex. A malicious sneer curved Alex's lips.

"Go on ahead," he waved off the man with glasses, "Get the elevator up, I'll meet you there."

He nodded and went on ahead, making a turn into another hallway and out of sight.

The man bent over to retrieve his strayed pen. Just as his pickle fingers touched it, black tendrils ascended on top of him. His body jolted at the ominous sensation of something casing over his back. His cries were smothered by the tendrils that swarmed into his mouth, down his throat, and through his alimentary canal.

His frantic struggle to pull them out for air only resonated sounds of choking. The squirming body finally seized when the biomass sliced into his fresh. Consuming him from within and out. Purloining his configuration.

His departed, distressed thoughts flashed into Alex mind, before past memories broke through, like a den giving out to an overpowering flood. It was a possess Alex took no pleasure in. The sensation felt drowning and crushing at the same time. Fortunately it subsided in a matter of seconds.

From experience Alex immediately took on his role and retrieved the dropped clipboard and pen to quickly re-join the other lab technician.

**~!-!~**

"You've gone really quiet suddenly Oliver." Said the he glasses man, who Alex now knew was named Ivan.

"Just thinking over what we will be dealing with." Alex said tapping the pen on the clipboard, a custom nervous impulse Oliver possessed. The action seemed to settle Ivan and his shoulders slackened.

"Yeah," he said softly and looked up at the changing floor levels. "Me too."

When they reached the designated level, the door slide open revealing not a hallway leading to the laboratory, but directly into the laboratory itself.

No wonder both of them had to enter their fingerprints and a bunch of passwords before they boarded the elevator.

The place was enormous, brightly lit to a bleach white hue, and teeming with buzzing scientists, technicians, specialities and everything of the thereof.

There was advance equipment whose functions were to measure, dissect, preserve, and even break down matter to particles. Most of them Alex could recognize from Oliver's memories and the memories of his past victims. However, there was a handful that he couldn't tell if it was a rocket launcher or a blender. Including a golden sphere centered in the midst of the cluttered lab, suspended by three rods protruding from a disc on top of a large mechanism, rimed with flashing clusters of buttons and screens.

"Oliver! Ivan!" A grey, bearded technician hunched over one of the blinking screens bellowed at them. "Get your asses in here and help me get this thing working."

"Yes sir." Ivan quavered and hurried in.

Alex strolled in after. No one pay them much attention, expect for the glaring old man. From a closer perspective Alex would have seen his eyes rimed red and a nerving vein popping out from his forehead, but his attention was preoccupied by the enthralling sphere. A strange primeval pattern was etched into it, and from those carvings a faint light seemed to resonate from within its core.

If these artifact, device, or whatever it was had the power to stop Alex, it mysteriousness made it convincing.

He was not going to let it.

"Oliver!" He man snapped. "Security just informed us that Zeus might be within the parameter, or even worse, in the vicinity. So presumingly, getting your fat ass going wouldn't be too much to ask for."

Alex's fist clenched at his side. "Coming sir." Compensation for carelessness had a nasty bite.

Though he was told to hurry, his eyes still wondered over the device. As he stepped within a closer radius to it his vision flashed white.

The earth suddenly quaked under his feet. He was not one to disconnect from his center of gravity, but it was as though his backbone dissolved and rag-dolled his body.

The tiles floor was cool against his face and ponged of bleach, which did not complement well with the siren ringing in his head.

His mind whirled in a panic.

_Fuck, what is this? Did they pant some kind of detector?_

Shaking arms pushed up his body, which felt inconveniently strapped to an invisible, two hundred ton blue whale. When the blur in his vision clarified he managed to make out the shape of his hands.

They were _wrong_. They were _his_ hands.

Alex looked over his body. His disgust, it was eradicated. Alex fought the urge to punch a hole in a wall, or several walls. Time however did not allow contemplation on how this calamity happened. The precedence was to get out before Blackwatch came busting down the doors.

He leapt onto his feet and readied himself to sprint, but never made the first step.

Everyone in the laboratory was on the floor unconscious. They laid so still…so corpus-like. The machinery and lighting in the lab all went dark but appeared intact. The only light left was emanated from the device, still perched on the rods.

Alex defectively hunched over, anticipating an ambush. He head twisted in every direction, searching, waiting. Nothing.

From the dead silence crawled out low whispering. It was inhuman and fast in its tongue. Alex tacked the sound, directing to the sphere.

"The fuck?" he breathed. That thing was _specking_? Cautiously he lifted his foot and placed it a step closer to the device. He watched, waited. No blinding flash. No undisruptive earthquake.

The second step did not produce the same eventless result. In a span of mere seconds waves of light pulsated from the sphere. The hush mutters morphed into horrifying shrills and screams.

Alex cried, shielding his ears with his hands from the stabbing pain of the noise. The crashes of the light beat him down on his knees. When his legs were about to give out and lay him on the floor to be flattened into a pancake, the overwhelming force inverted in on itself. A vortex formed sucking everything to the screeching sphere.

Alex's fingers morphed into elongated hooked claws, each one desperately dug deep into the ground.

The bodies reeled into the sphere's blinking light first and vanished within a flash. Then came the machinery. They screeched across the tiles before rolling towards it like tumbleweeds. One of the heavier equipment slammed against his back, unhooking him from his only salvation and sent them both into the blazing wormhole.

**~!-!~**

If Alex was equipped with the ability to vomit, he would have projected it over everything around him, _if _there was anything around him. His body's matter was being simultaneously twisted, stretched and compressed.

All his energy was required to maintain himself in one deformed piece. Anfractuous seams of bright yellowish hues cycled around him. Imprisoning him within the spiraling vortex, consonantly pulling him in a downwards direction. At least he thought it was down. The rest of the laboratories' contents had been disintegrated by the gyrate force.

A fissure cracked between the strands of light generated a new suction. It sucked him in and spat him out into the darkness outside the current's bounds. At first he thought he was shot out into void space, before he splattered on a wall, or more like into it.

The vigor of the hurl was powerful. He felt the partition of the stone structure he coiled with. His mire mush of a body slopped out of the projectile crater that he was embedded in and plopped onto the cold peddled ground. Clouds of dust and sand puffed up around him.

He groaned, drawing his biomass into an acceptable human's silhouette. His reformed eyes peered into the new found darkness, thankful for the changed scenery from the blinding environment he was previously twirling in.

He was surrounding by the skeletal remains of an ancient edifice, carved deeply beneath the earth. The air was stale and dusty. Endless hollows of shadows enfolded the many corners behind the debris.

Slowly Alex sat up. He rubbed his blurred eyes and blinked in clarity.

Now he was able to take in the enormity of the spacious shambling chamber. Soaring pillars held the ceiling, while a few others laid in decrepit fragments. Water trickled down its jaded walls where countless tunnel entrances hung on different levels. From the few lit torches he saw that some were caved in or inaccessible from demolish walkways, while others wormed deeper into the earth.

He had to get out of – wherever this place was.

He hastily stood up, wobbling a bit from the aftermath of the prior spinning. But which way was he to go?

His teeth clenched gallingly as he analyzed which passageway, out of the hundreds, could possibly lead him out to some open-air at least.

His body became rigorous when he saw the unexpected sight of golden plated chest with a glow that held similar resemblance to the device's. At the end of the chamber it was proudly mounted on a stone archway, that bared reminisce of meticulous carving of an ingenious lapidary.

Though it's was embellished with immaculate cherubim there was nothing sanctified about its aura. The intensity of its gleam were dimmer, providing him with the small comfort that it wouldn't react the same, but he still precociously added a few paces between them.

Now he really wanted to get out. If not from this place than from that _thing_ that brought him here.

Suddenly from behind him, someone was bellowing in French.

Alex had consumed enough native French speakers to make out something along the lines of: "Intruder! You won't get away!"

He didn't favor the sight of a raging man coming down the ladder to him, wearing a bucket for a helmet, dressed in outdated soldier's armor, and a mantle baring a red cross; but the sight of another human being was reassuring. At least he wasn't teleported to an alien universe.

His metal boots clacked heavily once he descended upon the ground, and his sword hissed out of its sheath.

Alex flexed his neck and cracked his knuckles. If this man really was human, he held some vital information on where he was.

**~1191 Solomon's Temple, Jerusalem ~**

A brief, but strong, tremor pulsated through the ground beneath Altair feet, before a reassuring thunder roared from within the shadows beyond them.

He stilled his sprit to a dead halt. The two brothers in toe stood close behind. All three were silence and keenly perceptive of the tiniest disturbance. The silence was perturbable.

Kadar was the first to interrupt, "What could have that been? Could the earth be splitting?" uneasiness edged his voice.

"Do not speck nonsense." Altiar said inexpressively. "We must proceed! The Templar's must not obtain the treasure."

"And you shall accomplish this by means of flouting?" Malik crossed his arms.

Altair glared at him with wrath, if solidified, could have slit fresh. But Malik paid no mind to his threatening sneer, or the whiteness of his baring teeth gleamed in the faint torch's light, and instead turned his attention back to where the sound resonated from and became visibility unsettled.

Altair marched forward, demonstrating the audacity the others lacked. Though, it was probably stubbornness and anger that moved him, while sensing the burning of a judgmental glower targeting his back.

Kadar posture slanted in favor of the exit.

"Come Kadar." Malik said.

**~!-!~**

The gut wrenching nausea threatened to goad Alex again. The soldier's memories were a bustled beating of alarms in his head. To be more precise, it was the lacking memories that hammered the most violently.

_- - -King Richard was leading the Crusade army to re-conquer the Holy Land from Salāh ad-Dīn - - -_

_- - - his lieutenant Robert de-Sable, the Grand Master of the Templar Order, was scheming an alternate constipation - - -_

_- - -to seize control of the Holy Land - - - _

_- - - strictly required the inhalation of an obstructing enemy Order - - -_

_- - - The Assassins - - - _

Alex refused to analyze those thoughts any further.

_Holy Land? Salāh ad – whoever? A Grand Master of Templars?_

All of this seemed like references form a history textbook, a very evocative one at that. One that depicted the finest details of the gruesome war over the reclaimed Cyprus, and the hellish massacre of thousands of innocent civilians, in order to construct the blood-spattered stepping-stones to the subjection of Siege of Acre.

Now the Templers infested Jerusalem, seeking –

_Now?_

That could not be right. To refer to the event in present tense was _absurd_. Right?

"No way," a compulsory chuckle jerked his shoulders. "It can't be possible…"

He dove back into those insane memories again, rummaging through them as though he was ransacking countless file cabinets.

Here had to be something – anything: satellite, television, radio waves, cars, steam engines...there wasn't even the concept of a printing press or a flying machine.

"_Fuck!_" his fist rammed into one of the fallen columns. It rumbled as it cracked in half and its opposite endings gravitated to the ground, boomingly pounding it.

He held out his arm for a long while. Heaving from the overwhelming concept…_reality_ of actually being in the period of the Third Crusade.

He spun around and glared with a spiteful snarl at the golden box with coaxing rays dancing about it.

All of his fury was set upon his words, "Why don't send me to the time of the dinosaurs while you were at it? Huh?"

The rays throbbed and Alex caught himself jumping back.

Stupid, this was all bullshit. Why was he flustered? Like some short of pathetically weak poltroon.

His anger was momentarily faltered by an unexpected curiosity in the distant rustling of feet in dirt. They approached from two directions: beneath the arch and from one of the higher elevated tunnels.

He thought it best to observe the encounter between the two groups. It might gain him a better understanding of the quandary he was in… _that_ and he didn't have to assimilate the displaceable and archaic lives of supposedly dead soldiers.

He scaled himself up the walls, fingers clawing into the hard rock, and then propelled himself to a partiality standing pillar with its top untouched by the torches' lights. Once nested and curtained by darkness all that remained was to wait.


End file.
